Author explores Old West campaign against Chinese

In coming to Stockton, Jean Pfaelzer is returning to the scene of an immense crime.

Brian McCoy

In coming to Stockton, Jean Pfaelzer is returning to the scene of an immense crime.

The University of Delaware professor is the author of "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans." The book recounts how whites in the second half of the 19th century engaged in an open campaign to destroy the West's Chinese immigrant population. Some of the tactics involved economic pressures; others, she writes, were nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

Pfaelzer comes to town Thursday to discuss her book at University of the Pacific. Stockton, she said in an interview from her Virginia home, occupies a singular place in the history of the anti-Chinese campaign.

"Stockton threatened to secede from the union if the Chinese weren't removed," Pfaelzer said. "The Stockton Mail (newspaper) supported secession if the Chinese 'problem' was not solved."

Other elements of Stockton's anti-Chinese campaign were reflected in cities across the West.

"In the 1880s, they started by trying to flood out the Chinese by using the fire truck," Pfaelzer said. "When that didn't work, there were a series of fires where Chinatown was burned to the ground."

In the decades after statehood, California's Chinese population swelled to 80,000. As laborers, the Chinese played an active role in the Gold Rush and building the western leg of the transcontinental railroad.

As positive as those contributions were, however, the Chinese also were seen as a threat. Part of it was unalloyed racism, but there also was an economic factor, as their willingness to work harder for lower wages undercut the state's burgeoning white labor movement.

Those issues led Congress in 1882 to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which stopped all immigration from China for 60 years. Average citizens, however, also took measures into their own hands.

"In Eureka, (the Chinese) were driven out in 24 hours and marched down to the sea at gunpoint," Pfaelzer said. A gallows was then erected to remind the exiles they were not welcome in town.

"In Tacoma (Wash.), the Chinese were rounded up and driven out of town in four hours," Pfaelzer added. "In Rock Springs, Wyo., 52 Chinese were massacred."

Then the Chinese fought back. They went on strike in some cities and filed lawsuits in others. They so effectively resisted the Geary Act - an 1892 law that required the Chinese to carry an identity card - that it was repealed. The Chinese called it the Dog Tag Law.

Pfaelzer first came across this history in the 1970s. While still in graduate school, she took a teaching position at California State University, Humboldt. When Pfaelzer investigated the noticeable dearth of Asian students at the school, she learned of Eureka's dark history.

Pfaelzer's teaching career later took her to University of California, San Diego, and then to Delaware. She has written three other books but knew she would return to the story of Chinese-Americans. The research for "Driven Out," she noted, required no great digging, just perusing the newspapers of the day.

"The troubling thing ... was that it was easy to find this material," Pfaelzer said.

"Chinese-Americans know this history as part of their cultural lore and family stories. They haven't necessarily told these stories or even been asked these stories by people outside the community."

And that, Pfaelzer said, is sadly typical. "Asian-American history has been under-read by the general American reading public," she added.

"I was born in Los Angeles and grew up surrounded by Chinese-Americans ... and I was never taught this."